Russians left Kabul stashed with weaponry

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One of the most abiding images of the Cold War was of a solitary Red Army
officer walking across the long steel bridge that connected Afghanistan with
Uzbekistan. That soldier was General Boris Gromov, and he waited for long
columns of lorries to make the trip ahead of him.

He was the captain leaving an abandoned ship, ending a ten year occupation
that the Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev had described as a “bleeding
wound”.

Uzbekistan was part of the Soviet Union in 1989 and it was the only logical
exit route. Between the summer of 1988 and February 1989 over